Voice's posts - Chinese uPOST

Fake phone numbers are a beautiful thing, whether you make them up on the spot or give out the number to a service like the Rejection Hotline. Best of all, though, are the ones you craft yourself, like the one I gave to car dealers that fakes a full voicemail message.

My five-year-old daughter Maggie seems to have two volume levels outside of our home: “off” and Fran Drescher at a loud bar. It took a while for her to become comfortable talking to people at all, so I’ve been letting it go when she suddenly has something important to say and starts speaking in ALL CAPS. But at a…

At the Metropolitan Opera last fall, in a show called “The Exterminating Angel,” soprano Audrey Luna sang a high A, setting a new record for the highest note ever sung at the Met. You might be more familiar with the phrase “High C,” a very typical high note at the Met—the high A is several notes higher. And it’s the…

If you’re trying to learn an accent for an acting role, understand an ESL speaker, or just hear some funny British accents, the Internet has a vast wealth of recordings of English spoken in every dialect. You can google any accent and find a relevant YouTube video, but you might want some more quality control, or to…

Actor and voice coach Amy Jo Jackson has consulted on productions of Venus in Fur, Henry IV, and the Broadway production of Kinky Boots. An experienced actor herself, whose credits include The Laramie Project, Into the Woods, Twelfth Night, and The Rocky Horror Show, Jackson teaches actors and non-actors how to reduce…

When I was in college, I got a job as a DJ for our campus radio station. Over Christmas break they played back old shows to fill the time, and one morning I managed to actually tune into myself on the radio. It took me a few moments to realize that the person talking was me, and my first thought was a surprised “Oh…

NPR’s reporters don’t all have perfect, radio-smooth voices, but they all sound natural and confident on air. In this video, vocal coach Jessica Hansen gives you three NPR-approved exercises to help you speak into a microphone while sounding more like yourself.

iOS: If you want to really kill it at karaoke, approximately hitting the notes won’t be good enough. A free app called Vanido can guide you through singing exercises, and show you in real time how well you’re hitting those notes.

You have a ton of voice recording apps for iPhone, but a lot of them don’t work super well. Cassette manages to offer up a good organization scheme, solid recording features, and a handy, yet pricey transcription feature if you need it.

One of the Amazon Echo’s sillier, but occasionally useful features is the ability to shop with your voice. Now, you can do that on Google Home in any city that has the Amazon Prime-esque Google Express.

Google may be playing catch up with the Amazon Echo, but Google Home already has a bunch of third-party services that can add features to your smart home speaker. Some are garbage, but we found the best ones that you should try out.

The Amazon Echo is pretty great at understanding your voice out of the box, but Alexa could always use a little help. If she gets a command wrong—or even if she gets it right—open up your Alexa app to give some feedback.

For whatever reason, the iPhone has tons of different voice recording apps, but very few of them do anything more than Apple’s free Voice Memos app. We like Just Press Record because it manages to make itself worth its asking price by offering a different experience and feature set than Apple’s offering.

You can perform a number of app functions with Google voice commands, like playing music for example. While Google usually lets you choose which app to use each time, it will now learn which apps you prefer and auto-select them.

The next time someone tells you to stop blowing bubbles in your drink, tell them you’re working on your singing career. As it turns out, blowing into a straw can help exercise your vocal cords and prevent losing your voice.

Sometimes you laugh because something is genuinely funny; sometimes you just do it to be polite. But fake laughter is very different in tone from real laughter, and most of the time, people can tell the difference.

If you’re looking for a headset that’s great when you’re talking to coworkers on Skype or Hangouts, teammates on Teamspeak or Ventrilo, or just rocking out to music, you have options. We asked you for your faves, then looked at the five best headsets. Now it’s time to crown the crowd favorite.

Whether you're gaming, taking video calls, listening to music, or doing all three, a good headset makes a huge difference. There are tons of choices on the market, lots of them good, but this week we're looking at five of the best, based on your nominations.